With increasing popularity of smart phones, the amount of internet data access by mobile phones is experiencing a so called “wireless data explosion”. A smart phone is generally regarded as a mobile phone built on a mobile computing platform and including a mobile operating system, with advanced computing ability and connectivity and include functions such as portable media players and GPS navigation units. Smart phones typically include web browsers, and high-speed data access via Wi-Fi and mobile broadband. The most common mobile operating systems (OS) used by current smart phones include for example Apple's iOS, Google's Android, Microsoft's Windows Phone, Nokia's Symbian, RIM's BlackBerry OS. Operating Systems support “apps”, which are software applications which carry out certain specific functions and are either pre-installed or are downloaded by the user from an “app store”.
It is common knowledge that mobile (smart) phone users of many large telecom operators are experiencing connectivity problems. The two main reasons for this are that (1) the backhaul network capacity between the wireless base stations and the core network is limited and (2) the capacity of the wireless channels from the base station antennas to the mobile phones are not sufficient to handle the amount of data requested by the mobile phones.
It is known to address the issue of limited backhaul capacity by implementing a cache. In fixed networks, e.g. corporate networks, web caching, which is a mechanism for the temporary storage (caching) of web documents, such as HTML pages and images, is generally carried out at a proxy server. The proxy server is then used for a group of corporate users based on proxy server capacity, geographical locations, etc. Web caching may be extended to mobile systems, where the cache may be at the base station (i.e. at the antenna site). However a drawback is that a caching server has to be installed at the numerous base stations of the system, which is both expensive, both in terms of cost and time to install. As an alternative, the proxy server may not be located in the base station, but may be located in the core network of the mobile system and might serve multiple handsets via multiple base-stations. But this does not make efficient use of the radio channels, since each handset uses a dedicated radio channel for getting the data from the proxy server.
As regards the issue of limited wireless channel capacity in the air interface between a base station and mobile handsets, there is a broadcast feature available in the mobile networks but this is usually employed only for the TV like broadcasting. Here all users who want to view a certain content channel can connect to the already streaming channel. A proposal for streaming applications of real-time data such as video is multicasting, where selected users subscribe to a service, see for example Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (MBMS), which is a standard defined by 3GPP. The streaming service is transmitted over the wireless interface, but only those users who have subscribed to the service are permitted to view the real time data being transmitted. A disadvantage is that this multicast method is designed for real-time data such as video where the user needs to join and watch the current video.